Jews love and loved Nelson Mandela. He inspired us with his
insistence that the old regime of apartheid would crumble more
quickly and fully when faced with revolutionary love and compassion
than when faced with anger and violence.

Mandela also challenged us to think deeply about whether the
current situation in Israel/Palestine reflects the ethic of
compassion that is so central to Judaism.

Some people on the Left reject Mandela's strategy. "How can one
be openhearted toward one's oppressors?" they say. "Fostering
compassion toward oppressors will undermine the revolutionary
spirit needed to defeat the evil ones."

Yet Mandela showed us the opposite -- that one can generate more
solidarity and more willingness to take risks in struggle when one
can clearly present one's own movement as morally superior to the
actions of the oppressors. Mandela's anti-apartheid movement
claimed this moral superiority through being able to respond to the
oppressors' hatred with great love. When Che Guevara said, "A true
revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love," he was
alluding to this same truth. And this is what the Torah teaches
when it instructs us to "love the stranger" (the "other").

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Although Mandela started out as the leader of a revolutionary
movement that had engaged in violence against the racist system of
organized violence called apartheid, he later became a convert to
the efficacy of a nonviolent struggle. The white power regime in
South Africa convicted him of conspiring to overthrow their power
and handed him a life sentence. He served twenty-seven years in
prison before the growing international support for the
anti-apartheid regime, combined with the pressure from the growing
power of the African National Congress inside South Africa, led to
his release. Those same pressures also forced the whites-only
racist government into negotiations as it sought to find a way to
appease the increasingly militant majority of black South Africans
and grew fearful of the economically crippling impact of a global
movement of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions.

When he was finally released from prison, Mandela challenged
those in his own movement whose encounters with the violence of the
apartheid regime had led them to believe that hatred of the enemy
and armed struggle against them was the only way to liberation.

Every oppressive regime fears that when it lifts up its boot
from the neck of those whom it oppresses, the previously oppressed
will jump up and do to the oppressors what the oppressed did to
them. That fear keeps people locked into the system of oppression,
fearful of what would happen if the previous victims become
"power-over-others" fanatics and seek retribution for their very
real suffering.

The brilliance of Mandela was in his ability to lead the
majority of South Africans to not do to others
what had been done to them. In speech after speech, he taught his
huge movement -- and eventually the entire population of South
Africa, which had elected him president -- that revenge was the
wrong way to go. Reconciliation, he argued, was the path to
liberation and to a peaceful transition to African majority rule.
And he was shown to be right!

Nelson Mandela shakes hands with
Frederik de Klerk, the last president of apartheid-era South
Africa, at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum held in
Davos in January 1992. Credit: Creative Commons/World Economic
Forum.

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It was this spirit of generosity that convinced the white
minority rulers of the apartheid state that they would be safe
after giving up their illegitimate power. The Truth and
Reconciliation tribunals that were set up only worked, to the
extent that they did, because of the background condition of
openheartedness, caring for others, and even generosity toward
one's oppressors that Mandela fostered even while his own people
were being brutalized.

Mandela's framework of compassion is deeply resonant with Jewish
worldviews. It was part of the greatness
of galut (exile) or Diaspora mentality that Jews
had grown to see the primacy of compassion
(rachmanus in Yiddish) as central to Jewish life.
Having been thrown out of our ancient land by Roman imperialism,
Jews came to recognize that our survival depended not on our
military power (of which we had none for most of the past 1,800
years) but on the ethical quality of our lives. When the king of
nearby Moab had sought to destroy us by having the prophet Bila'am
come to curse us, but the prophet instead said, "How goodly are thy
tents O Jacob, thy dwelling places, O Israel," the medieval
biblical commentators said he was praising the high ethical
standards that were manifest in the way the Israelites comported
themselves. No wonder, then, that so many Jews felt a special
kinship to Mandela because of his insistence on ethics and
compassion.

Mandela made a fateful choice in accepting a deal with the white
minority government that granted political power to black South
Africans without dismantling the white-dominated economic power
system that continues to leave tens of millions of black South
Africans in deep economic misery. Preferring an imperfect democracy
to the bloodbath that was the likely alternative, Mandela achieved
a first step toward full liberation, and created political
structures that could eventually lead to economic democracy as
well. It was the same choice made by the American revolutionaries
of 1776.

It remains to be seen whether we or other societies that made
that compromise will ever be able to use democratic forms
effectively so long as the economic elites are able to use their
huge wealth to shape public discourse and manipulate electoral
outcomes. Yet democratic political rights give some power to the
people to expand those rights, and this expansion of rights is
generally a more effective, lasting vehicle for transforming
society than an armed struggle is. So here too we have to
appreciate Mandela's choice, even as we cheer on those who now will
seek the next steps toward greater democratic control of the
economy and substantive (not just formal) equality.

Given the great feeling of affinity and kinship for Mandela
within the Jewish community, some Jews were shocked when Mandela
called upon the Jewish people to apply the same lens of compassion
-- the very values that had led so many Jews to fight against
segregation in the United States and apartheid within South Africa
-- to the situation in Israel. Mandela wanted Jews to recognize the
way they were betraying their own heritage by becoming oppressors
to another people after having endured so many centuries of
oppression. He called on both Israeli Jews and the organized Jewish
community globally that supported Israeli policies to see how
Israeli policies were oppressing Palestinians.

Instead of opening to that message, some Jews began to denounce
Mandela and his followers, though luckily that did not happen till
well after Mandela was already the elected president of South
Africa.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun and national chair of the Tikkun Community/ Network of Spiritual Progressives.
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